Posts Tagged ‘Michael Williams’

Ted Cruz staffer Joshua Perry recently tweeted that he had hit a deer. (Both his car and the deer were fine.) I quipped that he should hope it was a Dewhurst-voting deer. He replied he thought it was for Sadler. But there are so many other possibilities:

It was a Grady Yarbrough deer, disoriented from suddenly being thrust from the safety of obscurity, out into the bright onrushing headlights.

It was a Sean Hubbard deer, which had spent the last two months wandering around despondently without purpose, before finally deciding to put itself out of its misery.

It was a Craig James deer, sure it could make it across the road, but only made in 3% of the way before it got hit.

It was a Ricardo Sanchez deer, which just stepped out into the road before realizing that it didn’t have the energy to get to the other side.

It was a Joe Agris deer, who felt its mission was accomplished simply by stepping out onto the road.

It was a Michael Williams deer, which suddenly decided it wanted to be on another road.

It was a Roger Williams deer, which was just following the Michael Williams deer.

Two years ago, Michael Williams and Elizabeth Ames Jones were both on the Railroad Commission. Sixteen months ago they were serious U.S. Senate candidates. Now each has missed the runoff for their respective down-ballot races, U.S. CD 25 and Texas SD 25, respectively. (Donna Campbell made the runoff with Jeff Wentworth for SD25.) Evidently the Railroad Commission is a poor stepping stone to higher or lower office. Or at least for the 25th District of anything…

I’ve made my feelings about district-shopping and carpetbagger bids clear before. Roger Williams’ home of Weatherford is smack dab in District 12, currently represented by Republican incumbent Kay Granger. I can certainly understand not wanting to take on an entrenched Republican incumbent, but that still doesn’t justify district shopping.

That said, I think either Williams would make a solid Republican Representative.

Not sure how I feel about the switch. Certainly both Williamses struck me as conservative enough to represent Texas, and there would be lots of benefits to having another bright, articulate black conservative in the House. But I’m not wild about carpetbagger bids; no one should move to a new district just to get elected (legislators specifically gerrymandered out of their old districts just to get rid of them excepted).

The favorite for District 33? Michael Williams is the one with the heaviest conservative movement credentials, and having an outspoken, articulate black conservative in congress would be a big benefit at the national level. But Roger Williams has some significant endorsement firepower, including George H. W. and Barbara Bush, sitting Congresswoman Kay Granger, and Nolan and Ruth Ryan.

In the Senate race, I suspect Roger Williams decision will probably benefit Cruz and Leppert about equally, with Cruz picking up more of Williams voters, but potentially freeing up more donors in Leppert’s natural Metroplex base to donate to his campaign.

Now, with the Special Session adjourning, all eyes on the Senate race turn to see whether David Dewhurst jumps in or not…

The Ted Cruz winning streak continues, with two more key endorsements, namely Peggy Venable, Texas State Director for Americans for Prosperity, and Ernie Angelo, former RNC Committeeman.

Cruz has easily lapped his opponents in the endorsement race. Other than Roger Williams’ endorsement by former President George H. W. Bush, and the departed Michael Williams’ endorsement by Jim DeMint, I can’t think of a single high-profile endorsement for any other candidate. I don’t think Tom Leppert’s handful of pastors really counts (though getting a max donation from Roger Staubach certainly didn’t hurt).

Key endorsements aren’t worth as much winning the fundraising race, but they’re not chopped liver either. The fact that the Cruz campaign has rolled these out at a regular rate of a couple every week suggests to me that he has a fair number in his pocket, and wants to pace them out.

Washington Post writer Aaron Blake pays serious attention to Ted Cruz, and his role as Tea Party favorite. It’s a decent write-up for an out-of-state MSM outlet playing catch-up, but there are several statements about which I have at least some minor quibbles.

For example, take this sentence

That’s because he’s emerging as a potential top-tier candidate in the Lone Star state race, posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates in what should be one of the most expensive primary races in the country.

Saying that he’s “posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates” suggests that there are, in fact, better-funded candidates. Leppert only has more money on hand thanks to a $1.6 million loan (discounting loans, in Q1 Leppert pulled in slightly over $1 million, and Cruz pulled in slightly under $1 million), and even then the rest of Leppert’s fundraising relied heavily on max contributions from a limited number of Dallas-area donors. So Cruz is about as well-funded as anyone in the race right now. (Would Lt. Governor David Dewhurst change that if he jumped into the race? If he really wanted to commit a substantial portion of his personal fortune (consistently rumored, without verifiable attribution, to be around $200 million), yes it would.)

Likewise his suggestion that Leppert is one of the “big boys” (outside of Dallas, his profile is no bigger than Cruz’s) seems misguided.

Then there’s this:

Dewhurst is the prohibitive favorite if he gets in, and Leppert has made a big splash early with his fundraising. But many conservatives aren’t waiting for Dewhurst—choosing instead to rally around Cruz.

I think “prohibitive favorite” overstates the case a bit (I would use “formidable”), but the idea that conservatives have ever “waited” on Dewhurst is off-base.

As so many other Republican politicians do, Dewhurst occupies that vast gray area between a RINO (think Arlen Specter before he went The Full Benedict) and a real movement conservative. The phrase “a self-described ‘George Bush Republican'” appears, unsourced, in his Wikipedia entry (and thus is automatically suspect), and sums up the feelings of many conservatives towards Dewhurst. He ran as a conservative, and mostly governed as a conservative, but every now and then he would go off on Big Government tangents that would infuriate proponents of limited government. Despite this, outside the state, Dewhurst is regarded as something of an “arch-conservative” for shepherding through the (constitutionally-required) 2003 redistricting.

I wouldn’t go so far as to compare him to Charlie Crist (as some have), but there’s been real dissatisfaction with Dewhurst among movement conservatives, and it came to the fore with this year’s legislative sessions, where, despite having controlling majorities in both House and Senate, conservative Republicans found their agenda being thwarted in many ways great and small by Dewhurst in the Senate and Speaker Joe Straus in the House. Hence state senator (and possible U.S. Senate candidate) Dan Patrick’s lashing out at Dewhurst for thwarting his anti-TSA goping bill. Dewhurst managed to get the big things done (i.e., getting a budget passed without a tax hike), but there’s a sense among conservatives that he could have gotten a lot more conservative bills passed if he really wanted to, and that he “left money on the table” in the game of legislative poker by compromising when he didn’t have to

So it’s not at all surprising that Dewhurst is viewed as a stanch conservative when viewed from inside the Beltway; by Washington, D.C. standards he is. But there’s a widespread sense among Texas conservatives that they should be able to elect a full-bore movement conservative to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison, and that David Dewhurst isn’t that guy. There was a good deal of debate over whether Ted Cruz or Michael Williams was the preferred choice; with Williams getting out of the race to run for a House seat, the issue has been resolved in Cruz’s favor, as indicated by his impressive array of endorsements.

Still, those quibbles aside, the WaPo piece is a pretty solid look at Cruz, and is well worth reading for those following the Texas Senate Race.

(In the future, Brooks might want to run this sort of piece by Jennifer Rubin, who has a lot better grasp of the nuances of conservative politics than most MSM observers.)

A little bird passed me the flyer for a Michael Williams fundraising event for his Congressional campaign today at noon at The Coronado Club in Houston. Word is that he’s waiting until the District 33 lines are finalized by the legislature before officially dropping his Senatorial bid.